CHRISTIAN
Lily is standing in the family room when I come home. I’m later than usual because Thursday nights I meet some guys at the gym to shoot hoops, and then we go and get a drink. Tonight I considered not going with them but coming home to Lily instead, though ultimately I decided to go because, after thinking about it, it seemed like the best thing for me to do—for both Lily and me to do—is to not break from routine.
Now Lily stands at the windows, looking away from me, out into the yard. Her arms are crossed, her brown hair hanging long and wavy down her back. I can tell from the way she stands that Lily is anxious about something, and I feel guilty for sticking around for a second beer.
I come up from behind. I set my hands on her shoulders and massage them, feeling the tension she carries in her shoulders and neck.
“Hey,” I say. Lily turns around, and I know something is wrong but, for the first time in a while, my initial thought is not that something terrible has happened to the baby. “What happened?” I ask.
“Nina went to the police,” she says.
“And?” I ask, slowly, drawing it out.
“She told them that Jake is missing.”
“Okay,” I say. “And what did they say?”
“They weren’t too worried about it. They think he may have left voluntarily.”
“Okay,” I say again, nodding. “That’s good, right? For us.” I smile. I reach for her hands. I try and stay optimistic. I’m not actually worried about this at all. I can see that Lily is upset but I think I knew that inevitably Nina would one day go to the police. She had to. She couldn’t let her husband be gone forever and not say anything. It would be cruel if not suspicious. Lily nods, but I can tell she’s not so sure this is a good thing. “It’s okay, babe. Don’t worry about it. It’s a formality.”
“There’s more,” Lily says.
“What?” I ask, growing serious again because the tone of her voice scares me.
“Someone saw me there.”
“Saw you where?”
“At Langley Woods.”
A knot rises up to my throat. I swallow it back. It takes effort. I can feel my heartbeat in my ears, pounding.
This changes things. A witness now puts Lily at the scene where Jake was killed.
My words are slow, thought out and staccato-like. “What did they see?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing,” she says, quiet as a secret, as if someone might be listening to us. “I don’t think. Just me, walking alone, I guess because nothing was ever said about me being with someone. It must have been before,” she says, stopping there, leaving the rest unsaid. Before she met up with Jake. Before they went walking together. Before he coaxed her down that isolated trail. Before he assaulted her. Before she fought back. Before she killed him. Before she ran.
“Who?” I ask.
“The husband of one of my coworkers. Jim Brady. You met him once at a faculty holiday party.” I shrug. If I did, I don’t remember. Lily’s faculty parties happen with some frequency. Sometimes I remember colleagues of hers or their spouses, but sometimes I don’t.
“You didn’t see him?” I ask.
“No. I don’t even remember what he looks like, Christian. I wouldn’t know him if I did see him.”
“How do you know he saw you?” I ask, and she tells me how this coworker came to see her when Nina was in her classroom this afternoon. What makes it worse is that Nina now knows too that Lily was at Langley Woods.
Later, I decide that we need to find a way to move Jake’s car from the street. His car on the side of Newcomb Road is the only thing that puts him at Langley Woods, and it’s only a matter of time before his car rouses suspicion and people go there looking for him. That in and of itself wouldn’t be a big deal. But the fact that a witness now puts Lily at Langley Woods on the same day Jake disappeared worries me.
Presumably Jake’s key is on him, wherever he is. Lily keeps a copy of my car key with her in case a need arises. It’s possible Nina does the same.
We’re eating a late dinner, or trying to, but neither of us has the appetite for it. I make an attempt to eat, but Lily only stabs at hers with a fork, pushing her food to the sides of the plate like I used to do as a kid and didn’t want to eat something my mom had made.
“Do you think you could get into Nina’s bag at work to look for a key?” I ask.
Lily’s head comes slowly up. She stares at me from across the table. It’s dim in the house. We only turned on a couple lights and even those glow amber, not white. “Why?” she asks.
“I think it would be smart to move Jake’s car.”
She sets her fork down on the side of her plate. “What do you mean? Move it where?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’m thinking that if I just move it, to a parking garage or to some other random street, we’ll throw the police off when they go to look for him. They’ll be looking in the wrong place. We can get ahead of this.”
Lily chews over the next words in her head before letting them out. I see her wheels spin. “What will happen if they find him dead? Will I go to jail?”
My saliva turns thick. I swallow it back, with effort. “Of course not,” I say, but I’m lying. She knows that I am. I have my tells, like how I can’t make eye contact when I lie.
I think there is a very real possibility she could go to jail. I know lawyers, but it’s not the kind of thing I can outright ask somebody without it raising alarm. If Lily hit Jake so forcibly with that rock that it gave him a traumatic brain injury that he later stumbled off and died from, she did so in self-defense. But there is no actual evidence to this. It’s only her word that she fought back in self-defense. And, skeptics would ask, if it happened like she said it did, why didn’t she call for help when she got back to her car, why didn’t she go to the police?
I know why. She didn’t think she had hurt him as badly as she did. She thought she’d only slowed him down so that she could get away and she didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to hurt her friend.
It wasn’t until the next day at work, when Nina said how he didn’t come home, that Lily started to worry. But by then twelve or sixteen hours had passed. It was too late to call for help.
These things in combination make her look guilty.
I think about what might have happened when Lily hit Jake with the rock. I’ve thought about it many times, a repeating circuit in my mind. Lily said that she didn’t hit him just once. She hit him repeatedly. She said he fell. He may have lost consciousness. But even if he didn’t, if he remained conscious, he may have experienced symptoms like blurred vision or a ringing in the ears. Symptoms of traumatic brain injury can set in within seconds, hours or days. Without medical intervention, they get worse. He would have been disoriented, uncoordinated. Confusion with TBIs can be profound. What happens is that there is bleeding in the brain, from blood vessels getting hurt. The blood collects in the space between the skull and the brain. I know because these last twenty-four hours, I’ve spent an excessive amount of time researching brain injuries. That collection of blood is called a hematoma. It expands, putting pressure on the brain, causing death. But it’s not always instant.